5th Head

Tony Ellis · 23 Jun 1998, 09:59 · from urth-v0014.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk (Tony Ellis)
Subject: (urth) Re: 5th Head
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 10:59:30 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0014-0083 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0014/0083.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Ranjit wrote:
> Is there any hint in "V.R.T." of the folklore behind the
> Shadow Children in "A Story?"  I can't think of anyone in
> Marsch's interviews distinguishing more than two kinds of
> abos (Hill and Meadowmere)

The Shadow Children are secretive even by Annese standards, and the
colonists have a very shakey idea of who the Annese were, so you can't
expect too much. But Mrs Blount does say "I used to play with the
children, the little ones, you know." Now, is she thinking about Free
People children, or another kind of Child? "Ma said they'd eat me...
Anything to eat, they were always hungry."

M. Culot's grandfather's description of the Annese is also suggestive:
"sometimes like a man, sometimes like old wood."=20

VRT also mentions seeing them when living in the outback with his
mother, and their telepathic abilities "...and the Shadow Children of
course came to steal by evening... there are never as many of them as
they think, because some are only in the minds of the others"

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net